How to Teach a Phonics Lesson: The Five Domains of Language

Carla Stanford: Our kids come to school with language. They have learned how to talk from their homes. They come in and they are experts on their home language and they bring this area of expertise as they are learning to read. And our job is to continue to build on that. And language has five distinct domains. It has phonology, so that's dealing with the sounds. It has morphology. That's dealing with the parts of the word like prefix, root, suffix. There's semantics, which is all about word meaning and word use and word nuance. There's syntax, which is how the word is used in sentences and how sentences are built. And then there's pragmatics. And pragmatics is that social interaction. How do we use language socially? As we are building our phonics lessons and we are intentionally selecting our words, first, we consider all the words that fit the patterns and fit the cumulative review that we are putting in front of our kids.

And then we can look through our words and make decisions on what are some words I can choose that can help kids develop all of these areas. For instance, I could choose to give the word duck, and then I could say, "Now I want you to make it more than one duck." If my kids obviously would have to know suffix '-s' in order for me to do that. But if I say, "My word is duck' I want you to make it more than one." Now my word is ducks. I'm talking about more than one duck. So I get base word duck. I get suffix '-s'. Understanding base word and suffix in this scenario really prevents a spelling error. So we get "duck," which is '-ck', and we get suffix '-s'. When these two come together, they make the sound /ks/, which can sound like an 'x'. But if kids know I'm talking about duck — one — and now I'm going to make it more than one suffix '-s', that prevents that spelling error because they know the role of that suffix '-s' at the end of a word. So that's morphology. Semantics is all about the word and the depth of understanding that word. Understanding when you use it, when you don't use it, words associated with it, other words — synonyms — that you can use in place of that word. And the opposite, antonyms. All of this is related to semantics. And then we have syntax. And syntax is all about the structure of sentences. So understanding that duck can be a namer and that duck can also be an action plays out in syntax because then I can say, "the duck swims." Who or what? That's the duck. That helps me understand that meaning. And, "I ducked under." As soon as I see "ducked under," I know that now that's a verb. And I understand that's the "did what" in the sentence. And last is pragmatics. And pragmatics is all about how we use the words in conversation and socially.

And a lot of times in that scenario, the word is not holding the meaning that it normally would hold. For instance, a deck is almost like a little porch on the back of your house. But if you are a baseball person, pragmatically, you may say, "They're on deck." So if you're on deck, that means you are up next. And then that saying has made it from the baseball world into our world and we may say, "okay, you're on deck" and that means you're up next. You're on deck to go in the bathroom next. You're on deck to be the line leader. And teaching kids that we can take this word literally, like deck, and say, "But in this scenario it doesn't mean ... have that literal meaning anymore." We use the meaning differently. So all of this work related to the domains of language can happen intentionally during our phonics lesson because we don't want to silo our phonics from our language comprehension.

We really want kids to have the opportunity to use the language that they came to school with and to build on that language in our classrooms while they're learning to decode. This is especially important for our English language learners and for our children who speak a different dialect. They come to school with this rich, amazing oral language, and now they're learning decoding and connecting word meaning at the same time. Well, they already have meaning. They know all kinds of words. So giving them meaning and then connecting it to decoding is a really nice way to leverage their assets of amazing language while you're teaching phonics.

Narrator: Reading Universe is made possible by generous support from Jim and Donna Barksdale, the Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the AFT, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and anonymous donors.